AP staffers win prestigious Indian journalism awards

NEW DELHI (AP) — Two Associated Press journalists are among the winners of the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Awards, India's most prestigious, for work exposing the public health and environmental damage done by the country's asbestos industry and capturing the devastation of last year's floods in the Kashmir region.

New Delhi-based Correspondent Katy Daigle, who manages the AP's text report in South Asia, received the foreign correspondent award for her 2014 series on asbestos. Srinagar-based photographer Yasin Dar won the photojournalism award for his work capturing the floods that swamped large parts of Kashmir.

The awards were presented to Daigle and Dar by India's Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in New Delhi on Monday.

Daigle's series focused on how asbestos, a largely outlawed scourge to the developed world, is still going strong in India and other developing countries, making products aimed mostly at the poor. Though India banned asbestos mining decades ago, it's the world's biggest asbestos importer, and the $2 billion industry has at least 100 manufacturing plants. Even abandoned mines exact a heavy toll on Indian health because no cleanup work has been done.

Daigle covers environmental issues for the AP in South Asia. Over her 16 years with the company she has also worked in New York, the Caribbean and London.

Dar joined the Associated Press in 2004, has covered the Kashmir conflict extensively and has covered the fighting in Afghanistan.